Indexed Page Count TOO high

[jimvet]

i have a site with no more than about 6000 total pages. However, Google returns a count of nearly 19,000 pages while Yahoo and the others return a count of only about 350 pages.

What is going on? Can I believe Yahoo? I know I can't believe Google. Back in March 05, Google showed 5900 pages indexed which made sense but now, I'm at a loss.

anyone have an explanation?

Thanks,

Jim

[glengara]

My guess is that G is multi-indexing the same pages but with different Urls, not uncommon with "dynamic" databases, AFAIK.

[wavedancing]

Same thing happens to my site. I think Google might still index pages deleted long time ago. Or Google may index some error message pages.

[decaff]

Are you using Cart ID session numbers in your url strings..? if so, then these can, overtime be indexed as individual url strings to the same page...because the numerical string changes due to date stamping .. etc..

[wednesday]

URL ?

[TechEvangelist]

My bet is on the session ID. If you allow a session ID to display in the URL, every time a spider hits that page they will see a different URL.

Check your listings in Google to see if a session ID is tacked on to the end of the URLs.

[AuctionHugh]

And the problem with session ID's in links, is they are dead links when someone clicks on them in google!

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[SEOforGoogle]

one thing about the session id's though - When Google comes back to a page that it can't find anymore, it will keep trying for 90 days - if after that it can no longer find that page, it will be removed from the index.

[jimvet]

The URL in question here is http://travel.yellowpages.com.

We have two domains driving traffic into the same affiliate booking engine. the other domain is the one in my signature - http://travelyellowpages.com

Cheers!

[TechEvangelist]

The problem is that you can only view the first 1000 pages in G. I went through those, but could not determine why so many pages show up in the page count. It is very possible that the count is off.

[sem-seo-pro]

Hi there

one thing about the session id's though - When Google comes back to a page that it can't find anymore, it will keep trying for 90 days - if after that it can no longer find that page, it will be removed from the index.

Actually a new client removed their site from the server they were hosted on May 7th 2005 and since they had 100,000 pages and multiple googlebot visits, by Monday May 9th, 2005 the site had been dropped from Googlebots index of results.

They too are dynamically generated.

Clint